Three Identical Strangers

In the 1960s, a research project into identical siblings, placing them separately for adoption into different classes (poor, middle and wealthy), was done for the purpose of determining the impact of financial resources on their outcomes. Back in the 1930s to 1950, Georgia Tann had a similar thought – taking babies from poor families and placing them into wealthier homes would lead to better outcomes for the children.

My mom was one of those babies. She was adopted in 1937. Both of her parents were very poor and struggling to survive the Great Depression but they were exploited by threats from Georgia Tann that her close relationship with the Juvenile Court judge in Memphis would support any removal of children she suggested. Sadly.

So, in the 1980s, when these young men were 19 years old and began attending college, they discovered that they had been separated after birth into different adoptive families. Even the adoptive parents didn’t know there were other genetically identical siblings. The triplets accidentally found each other when two of them enrolled at the same college and found the third when he saw the story on the news. After the three siblings reunited, they became media darlings for awhile and even met their original biological parents.

It is not entirely a happy story and a suicide trigger warning is justified. The two surviving triplets carry the DNA, the history, the pain, and the heart of their deceased brother. As the three boys entered adulthood each of them dealt with mental illness and psychiatric care.

The carelessness of the adoption agency that gave the boys away turns out to be something far crueler and more deviously deliberate than possibly imaginable. It is a shockingly true story but not unlike other psychological research from that era. Ethics were just not on the radar yet. People were treated like lab rats.

One woman, now much older, who was involved with the research study is blasé about the whole thing saying it was exciting to mess with people’s lives and noting what’s done is done.

The children who were the study subjects involved will not have access to the findings until 2065, by which time they will likely not be still alive. This is because our own government funded this study.

This program does show how strong genetics truly are. Being separated at birth results in life long trauma. All adoption agencies exist to make money. The program suggests that some of the adoptive parents would have happily taken all three boys, if they had known the truth, at the time.

One of the scientists involved in the study interviewed for the program kept laughing, saying inappropriate things, none of what happened was funny. He said there’s probably at least four people (probably many more) who have no idea they are twins or that they were part of a study.

Currently one of the brothers practices law, the other sells insurance and investments. One of the two is (or soon will be) divorced. These kinds of mental health and relationship impacts are quite common among adoptees.

Which leaves me with two questions (I have not seen, only have read about this program) – Is science worth keeping secrets and being immoral to accomplish unbiased research ? And how much of who we are is Nature and how much Nurture ? (That second one I’ve been looking at for 20 years.)

Slightly Off Topic

This may seem off topic but please bear with me. This morning I realized that my tolerance for injustice has diminished. I believe that learning about how my maternal grandmother was trapped and exploited has done that to me.

My grandmother’s only deficiency was poverty. She went to Porter-Leath orphanage for temporary care of my mother while she attempted to get on her feet financially and they accepted my mom under a temporary condition. My grandmother tried to reach her husband, my grandfather, who didn’t respond to the Juvenile Court’s notification – I believe – because he was out with the WPA trying to help Arkansas deal with a Super Flood of the Mississippi River that began the month my mom was born.

Georgia Tann had a repeat, paying customer in my adoptive grandmother. She had previously adopted a son from the Tennessee Children’s Home and returned to them seeking a little sister for the family before my mom had even been born. Miss Tann had a network of enablers, movers and shakers in the Memphis elite that helped her acquire product to sell. Forgive my harsh judgment.

So my poor grandmother was pressured with a surrender or I’ll have you declared unfit by my good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley. Even so, 4 days later my grandmother tried but failed to recover my mom. She never had any other children.

I have always paid my medical bills – even those I thought unfair – even if I made the creditor wait and sent them only the smallest amounts for the longest time. Having been uninsured for 30 years, I was grateful to finally qualify for Medicare. I thought might as well catch up the basics and so went to my local nurse practitioner for a pap smear.

Unknown to me, the coding recommended by the laboratory to the doctor’s office for women between the ages of 30 and 65 was to also do a hpv test on the same specimen. This was never discussed with me. Medicare paid $29.44 against a bill of $128.20 for the pap smear but refused to pay the $169.80 for the hpv test.

I have been fighting this bill for 8 months and find myself trapped and exploited by a greedy laboratory. I offered them $60 for the hpv test if they would write off the rest as they did for Medicare. I thought I was being more than reasonable.

They have refused my offer and so I will now refuse to give them even a penny. I no longer tolerate such exploitation. The doctor’s office should have advised me to wait a year for the pap smear and this would not have even occurred. I refuse to be a victim. I never gave my permission and I won’t give in now.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far. Do NOT allow LabCorp to do any tests for you. I won’t ever again allow them to do any tests for me and I will not use my local doctor’s office for my next Medicare approved pap smear in 3 years. They both lose. I am not worried about a small black mark on an otherwise excellent credit rating. I don’t intend to use credit anyway but I do have an Amazon Visa as long as I can pay in full with the first bill if I need that or just want to burnish my credit rating.

Questions Without Answers

Try as I might, my heart longs for answers to questions that I will never be able to truly answer. I may have theories but they may be wrong. For too many years, when we knew nothing about my adoptee parents’ origins, we made up plausible stories –

My mom had been stolen from her illiterate parents from the hospital in Virginia where she was born by a nurse in cahoots with Georgia Tann who transported her to Memphis. There was no other way she could reconcile being adopted as an infant in Memphis when she had actually been born in Virginia and who could blame her for that confusion ?

Because my dad was dark complected and seemed so comfortable with the natives in Mexico, I thought that he must have been mixed race with a Mexican mother and an Anglo father and that she had crossed the border with her infant and left him upon the doorstep of the Salvation Army with a note that said – “Take care of my baby, Maria.”

So my maternal grandmother was exploited by three women in Memphis – Georgia Tann certainly but also Georgia Robinson the superintendent at Porter Leath orphanage who had agreed to give my mom “temporary care” and then betrayed her to the baby seller, Miss Tann, as well as the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley who was Miss Tann’s close friend and could be counted upon to remove any child from their parents for nothing more abusive than poverty and a lack of immediate family support.

And my dad wasn’t Mexican at all. His dark complexion came from his Danish immigrant father who was a married man, so his unwed young mother went to a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers at Ocean Beach California just west of San Diego. His father probably never even knew of his existence. More’s the pity, as fishermen who loved the ocean they would have been great friends.

I’ll never know why my maternal grandfather never came to my maternal grandmother’s rescue or why they separated after only 4 months of marriage with her pregnant already. I’ll never know why she went to Virginia to give birth, though I suspect she was sent away to avoid embarrassment to her immediate family in a very conservative religious rural community.

I can only live with the questions that will never have answers while basking in the glow of knowing so much that over 6 decades of living never prepared me to uncover.

Before and After

I’ve only just started reading the nonfiction sequel – Before and After – to Lisa Wingate’s bestselling fictional novel Before We Were Yours. Sadly, the true life stories of Georgia Tann’s victims are all too familiar to me and her methods clear in my family’s own circumstances. I may have more to say about the book when I finish reading it.

There actually was an adoption ring in Memphis in the decades from 1930 to 1950. The movers and shakers in Memphis were all to happy to make Georgia Tann the scapegoat and bury the evidence along with her – when she conveniently died of the complications of cancer. It was an opportune moment, just before criminal charges were going to be filed against her. And those charges would have only been profiting illegally from the placements and not the worst accusations against Tann.

Her legacy of wrongs emerged as her story came back to light in the early 1990s and eventually caused a law to open the sealed adoption records for the victims by the state of Tennessee. I have that law to thank for my mom’s adoption file. Sealed records remain a hindrance for adoptees in many states even today. I know, I’ve hit locked doors in California, Virginia and Arizona.

Thanks to Lisa Wingate’s fabulously popular telling of the Georgia Tann scandal in a compelling story, the whole story is being added to and told yet again. This brings some justice to the victims and their descendants. I am one of an unfortunate community of such persons. There are thousands of us.

In our family’s story – the adoption ring was composed of Georgia Robinson (the superintendent at Porter-Leath Orphanage who conveniently retired early just before the scandal report was released), Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley (who was forced to retire because of it) and of course, the Baby Thief herself, Georgia Tann. Miss Robinson seems to have escaped the scandal with her “good name” intact but it was she who betrayed my original grandmother. Porter-Leath took my mom in for TEMPORARY CARE. Miss Robinson alerted Georgia Tann to the presence of a “highly marketable” blond baby girl less than a year old.

Judge Camille Kelley was involved in my original grandmother’s life when she first returned to Memphis, after having given birth to my mom in Virginia. Since my grandmother’s widowed father and siblings still lived in rural Tennessee east of Memphis, I can only assume her father sent her away to have my mom after her husband seemed to desert them. I will never have the answer to the questions that weigh heavily on my heart about why that seemingly good man – my original grandfather – did that. Later, when my adoptive grandmother was on her way to collect her prize, Judge Kelley threatened my original grandfather with a subpoena if he didn’t sign the surrender papers.

There is no doubt in my mind that Georgia Tann exploited my desperate grandmother with a no win demand – surrender or be declared unfit (her only deficiency being a financial one). It is also clear that 4 days after signing the surrender papers, my grandmother tried to recover my mom – but Georgia Tann had a paying customer and no way was she going to let my mom go out of her control.

Do-Gooders

Social workers have been the rank and file workers in the world of adoption, endowing them with authority and expertise was a prerequisite for the professionalization of adoption. Making sure that family-formation would be overseen by professionals was an important part of making adoption modern. Therapeutic perspectives on child placement and adoption grew out of a convergence between social work and science.

In the circumstances surrounding my mom’s surrender and adoption, there were three women who were part of the early profession of social work – whether by education to obtain a degree or simply by choice.

Georgia Tann, who headed the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, was the central figure in our family’s adoption history. Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley was actively involved in a “social work” perspective as she practiced her legal work centered on juvenile delinquency, family stability and child removal. Georgia Robinson, was the superintendent of the Porter-Leath Orphanage, who agreed to take my mom in temporarily while my grandmother tried to get on her feet. She betrayed both my mom and my grandmother by alerting Georgia Tann, who had a customer waiting for precisely the kind of infant my mom was dating back to before she had even been born in Virginia.

I think of them as the original do-gooders and it is likely that they did some good. However power and money eventually corrupted all of them, resulting in an investigation that included pending criminal charges.

Georgia Tann died 3 days before those criminal charges were to be filed and all of the movers and shakers in Memphis were happy to forget all about it.

H L Mencken is quoted saying – “Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of improving or saving X, A is a scoundrel.” There were scoundrels in Memphis from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Empty Reassurances

After Georgia Tann had taken my mom away from her mother and sent my mom almost 1,500 miles away, she tried to reassure my grandmother (who never intended to lose custody of my mom) that it was all for the good (and judging by some truly horrific stories about Georgia Tann’s rule over children, my mom was lucky she was removed quickly and ended up with decent people to raise her).

On August 30, 1937, Georgia Tann wrote to my grandmother – “The baby has been placed in a lovely home where she will have every care and much love. Any time you wish to hear from her, we will be glad to write you.”

My grandmother disappears from the adoption file after she received that letter. After being pressured into signing the surrender papers (either sign these or we’ll ask Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley to declare you an unfit mother), she tried to undo the damage. Telephoning the Tennessee Children’s Home office and speaking to Helen Rose, she said “I heard from my friend in New Orleans. She said she will take me and the baby. I need to come and get her so we can leave.”

They had a paying repeat customer in my adoptive grandmother, there was no way they were going to let my mom go back to her mother, no matter what. They told her that she was to bring the names and addresses of her friends to their office. They could not let her recover custody of my mom until they investigated the people who would help them first.

My grandmother’s name was Elizabeth Lou but when she had my mom she went by Lizzie Lou. In letters to Georgia Tann and in the divorce papers filed by my mom’s father, she is shown as Elizabeth. But when she died, she had Lizzie Lou put on her gravestone. I believe she waited all of her life for my mom to be reunited with her. She had no other children.

The Baby Thief

I first read the book by Barbara Bisantz Raymond just after my dad died in 2016 but before I had my mom’s adoption file from the state of Tennessee. Yes, my mom was adopted from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society at Memphis in 1937. I only really noticed the horror stories which left me grateful about who adopted my mom and uncle.

I got that file in October 2017 and I am now thoroughly familiar with what is there. I thought, I really ought to read this book again and that is what I am currently doing. Having educated myself about adoption issues and mother/child separations now, the content is getting more attention from me at a deeper level.

My mom tried to get her file from Tennessee in the early 1990s – before the state passed legislation that would have allowed her to have it in the late 1990s. Sadly, she never knew that it became available for her but it is my gift that it has come to me. She claimed in her effort that she had been inappropriately adopted. Though her made up explanation of how she got from Virginia, where she was born, into the hands of Georgia Tann has proven to have not been the case (she wasn’t exactly “stolen”), it now appears the “inappropriately” was accurate.

It appears that my mom’s adoption violated Tennessee law at the time it occurred. In 1937, Tennessee adoption law did not allow out of state adoptions and even after it was changed, it would have been necessary to finalize such adoptions in Tennessee. My mom’s adoption was finalized in Arizona.

At the time her surrenders were signed (under threat by Georgia Tann of court action), they were supposed to be verified by a judge (though of course, since the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley was in cahoots with Tann it probably wouldn’t have changed anything). The law wasn’t changed until 1941 to simply allow notarized surrenders (which is all my mom’s parents’ surrenders had and those were notarized by – you guessed it – Georgia Tann).

And Fanny Elrod who my adoptive grandmother seems to have had the most correspondence with, allowed herself to be bullied by Georgia Tann and they were both there when my mom was placed in my adoptive grandmother’s arms.

Finally, back to 1917, child placing agencies were supposed to be licensed by the state but the Tennessee Children’s Home Society never applied for a license until after the scandal broke in 1950 and Georgia Tann was dead and the Memphis branch permanently closed.

So, my mom was right – her adoption was actually ILLEGAL for several reasons as described above.

Secrets

I don’t know why they thought they could get away with it. Maybe because their true identities were a secret they couldn’t reveal to themselves.

My sister had a baby and my parents told me the baby died. I developed a story because deep in my heart I didn’t believe the story I had been told. I believed she had been stolen from the hospital. Not accurate but the fact that she was alive was not wrong.

My mom believed she was stolen and though not in the manner she imagined, she was not far from the truth of the situation. Her mom fell into a trap and was given a no-win solution – surrender her child who she could not support financially or be declared an un-fit mother by the Juvenile Court Judge who was in cahoots with the notorious Georgia Tann, known for stealing and selling babies.

Eventually, I confronted my mom with the secret of my sister’s baby and she came clean with me. Why did they tell a lie instead of the truth ? I was told it was to spare my adoptive paternal grandparents.

But how could that be true ? I believe they were the ones who kept me in the family when my own unwed mother conceived me.

Sadly, I’m left to consider the weird disconnect of my parents as parents. Was the truth actually that they didn’t want to end up financially and physically responsible for my sister’s daughter ?

Nevertheless, my mom’s life was “good” as most lives go and so was the life of my niece.

Secrets tend to out themselves eventually. My parents had to face the truth when my sister’s son married and invited his half-sister to the wedding. I know it was an uncomfortable moment for my parents. Lucky for them that most of the attention was focused on the bride and groom instead.